Micha Clazing wrote:Audio is so trivially low-bandwidth that you could decode and cache a million MP3s to uncompressed in memory on the fly and still have plenty of memory and processing power left over. Once the audio is cached you can play it forwards, backwards, jog, fast forward, whatever you want with no issues. I'm getting a bit tired and fed up with all these "consumer formats are bad and that's why you can't use them in Resolve" arguments. If you don't know what you're talking about, keep your mouth shut.

Did you read the article link I posted above? Are you aware that MP3 files actually sound bad -- on top of the known editing problems I cited? To cling to MP3s for pro use in post is arrogant stupidity that's off the scale.

I don't have a problem with somebody shooting wedding videos or little student films and throwing in an MP3 here and there. If that's the case, use a free converter to externally convert the file to WAV -- preferably a version with embedded timecode -- and it will at least function in any editing program. It still won't sound great, but at least it will play.

I'm perfectly aware of what MP3s sound like. I am also aware of no reasonable technical limitations why editing/grading/finishing software should have any problems dealing with such files. In the end, the client is king. You can advise to use WAV/AIFF, but when you have the client next to you in the room, and they hand you a USB stick with an MP3 file, what would you prefer to do? Load up separate software and clumsily convert it to WAV/AIFF because your professional software can't handle MP3, or would you prefer to just drag and drop it into the project and have it work perfectly without conversion? I know what will make a better impression.

Good Reply - all the Resolve/ MP3 experts here need to accept the fact that just because Resolve chokes on MP3 files does not mean the entire industry can no longer offer the billions of MP3 files, it don't work like that!

Mike Mas wrote:OK genius, It appears you're confused! Your comments about it being a business decision is comical because all its doing is killing Resolves business.

Your the confused one, I'm a developer by trade and I've worked on everything from TELCOM systems costing 100s of millions, to piddly webpages.

Let me see if I can enlighten you on the concept of cost when it comes to software development. Take a feature request for example, before a developer ever touches code, the request will be reviewed. By who and how many people its reviewed by depends on a companies organizational structure. It could be as simple as a 15 min review by a project/product manager, or multiple rounds of review across multiple departments and levels of management. This review process has a cost.

When it reaches the developer it might be a 5 min fix/change, or it could be a multi month project. Its the same way when it goes to the testing department (if the company has one), it could be quick, or it could be in-depth depending on what the change was. The development and testing has a cost.

These are the obvious and easily countable costs. The less tangible ones are where does the change/fix slot into the priority list. Does a new feature get delayed because the development staff was told to fix an edge-case bug or performance issue. How many potential sales do they loose to competitors because the new mainstream feature was delayed.

far to often end users don't have a clue in regards to the scope of what they are asking for. The system I'm working on today has known edge case bugs, that won't ever be fixed, because it has been deemed not worth it, and they have been around for over a decade.

Mike Mas wrote:Use your wisdom and explain why I can put the same 4k@60 files and a MP3 in a IMovie and it plays and edits fine, I don't even have to optimize the video, yet if I place the same files in Resolve timeline it chokes. Don't give me all the capability lecture about what one program has over the other, this is just a simple example of just playing two files in the timeline.

Read my Lips - there is not one logical reason Resolve should "choke" on a tiny 26MG MP3 file, its Broke!

Get this through your head, their is a difference between just playing a file, and internally converting to a standard form before playing it.

Direct from the manual

It's useful to know that, internally to DaVinci Resolve, all image data is processed as a full range, uncompressed 32-bit floating point data. What this means is that each clip in the media pool, whatever it's original bit-depth or data range, is scaled into full-range 32-bit data.

Add to that that you can change how the color is managed YRGB vs ACES, etc, and that adds more overhead.

Now consider they are most likely doing the same thing to audio. I could easily see BM scaling audio to 32 bit, and re-sampling it to 96 or 192KHz internally.

It's not hard to see why a consumer grade i5 based machine might not handle it all that well. A machine can be bottle necked in a lot of ways not readily apparent to an end user.

Charles Bennett wrote:53 posts later and still you would rather rant than let us help you by making the mp3 available to test. As I said previously, Resolve quite happily opens and plays mp3s on my system.

Good: I just (re) make a test from a video clip (29.970) with audio 7.1. Export 7.1. : I have 8 tracks.Open with Audition:: OKConvert audio to MP3 (stereo) 320K bitrate (constant).Creating a new HD project: A video clip (same)Project is 29.970New timeline + same video + new mp3 (stereo)Fairlight: bus Format stereo

You seem to be making the rather odd conclusion that small file size equates to simplicity in the digital realm when nothing could be further from the truth and frankly makes you sound naive. Many posters have given you very solid and civil advice and instead of following it you prefer to rant. If you had just an inkling of how many issues long time users of Resolve have had to endure over the many years, I think you might understand how trivial your complaint sounds.

Here's some pro advice though, just about every competent user of Resolve spends time vetting their workflows. It is then that the problems are discovered and workarounds are found, not when deadlines are looming or after you hit the buy button. IOW, I don't think (I could be wrong here) anyone uses Resolve as an AIO tool, even with the integration of Fairlight. For example, I never use Resolve's built-in titler. I could rant about what I think is a substandard titler in Resolve, but why? Use Resolve for what it is good at--LUTs, grading, power windows, etc. For everything else there are always solutions to be found. At least that is the pro user perspective.

I always have a media converter on my dock. It is one of the most useful tool in my system. When I receive a MP3 file, the first thing I do is always convert it to wav file. BTW, I don't think using one program to finish all the job is more impressive to your client than using multi different programs which makes the whole process super complicated.

Mike Mas wrote:Use your wisdom and explain why I can put the same 4k@60 files and a MP3 in a IMovie and it plays and edits fine, I don't even have to optimize the video, yet if I place the same files in Resolve timeline it chokes. Don't give me all the capability lecture about what one program has over the other, this is just a simple example of just playing two files in the timeline.

Read my Lips - there is not one logical reason Resolve should "choke" on a tiny 26MG MP3 file, its Broke!

Regards Mike

iMovie supported quite a few formats that FCPX, Avid and Premiere could not handle for quite a long time. The reason was that iMovie was developed by Apple as a consumer rather than pro product to enable home users to deal with those very same consumer formats that were a problem on pro software. It's development was also fresh and did not have to take into account backwards compatibility. Mp3 files were also difficult to use in FCP7 for quite a long time.

In contrast DaVinci was developed a very long time ago (1980s) as a pro grading only software that would grade 35mm film transfers from an URSA telecine to tape. It did not import or handle ANY media files!The current version of DaVinci has had so much work done over the years that it barely resembles the older versions. It was never an editing software until the last two versions. Yes editing was possible, but that was more a convenience so last minute changes & repairs could be done.

Converting mp3 files before using in DaVinci is not exactly a new problem for me as I had to do it for every mp3 file on FCP7 or timeline playback would choke.Apple Compressor will convert a batch of mp3 files faster than you can order a coffee for your client!

Post a link to the offending mp3 file. Many people have been asking for you to post it.

Micha Clazing wrote:I'm perfectly aware of what MP3s sound like. I am also aware of no reasonable technical limitations why editing/grading/finishing software should have any problems dealing with such files. In the end, the client is king. You can advise to use WAV/AIFF, but when you have the client next to you in the room, and they hand you a USB stick with an MP3 file, what would you prefer to do?

I always have 6 or 7 favorite utility programs loaded up 100% on any computer I use. Heck, iTunes is free and takes second to use, either on Mac or Windows, if I'm just converting from MP3 or WAV, I'd use that in a pinch. I'm usually running iTunes in the background anyway just so I can listen to music while color-correcting.

But I think a larger part of the role of the colorist today is to help clients avoid doing something ignorant and stupid. It's our job to tactfully tell them, "this will be a bad-sounding source -- let's use this temporarily and try to get a full-res WAV before we finish this." I have no problem doing this with a placeholder. It's no different when they have 10 pieces of MP4 stock footage with a watermark in it, and we'll say, "I'll be sure to drop in the ProRes tomorrow."

There are a lot of jobs where "good enough" will work, but I think a truly good colorist is going to stop a client from damaging their project out of technical ignorance. I'll always push for a better copy of something (sound or picture) whenever there's time or money to do so.

Mike Mas wrote:Good Reply - all the Resolve/ MP3 experts here need to accept the fact that just because Resolve chokes on MP3 files does not mean the entire industry can no longer offer the billions of MP3 files, it don't work like that!

And all the new users here need to understand that there's a point where an excuse for mediocrity is just lazy and a bad practice. Try harder and know, as the late great Tom Petty once sang, "there ain't no easy way out." Doing things the right way is often the hard way, but it's the right thing to do. And that also counts for getting the WAV file instead of a low-res piece of crap compressed file.

Mike Mas wrote:Just another Goofy reply - Both yourself and Resolve needs to get up to speed

Not sure if this was pointed out in this overly long thread.

But you should do something about that approach Mike.. Some of the people that offered you help in this thread are top level professionals, and even the one's that aren't came with good intentions. You calling their replies "goofy" dosn't make you look good, to say the least. We're all here cause we want to help. you don't get to choose how you're helped so try not to judge/criticize that help if you didn't read exactly what you were expecting.

That said. in EVERY forum or group I've been answering questions about NLEs in the past 15 years there isn't a week that goes by without someone, having some problem, with some file type on some program. 95% of the time these are user/system/workflow related and not software.

MP3 was designed as a delivery format. It's for the end user to listen to something that is finished - there's no more work to be done to that file. Or as a sample of a work in progress.

I never bring mp3 files into a NLE project. Never. I've made a living shooting/editing projects for 20 years, and watched the progression of various editing platforms. Premiere, FCP, Avid and most recently Davinci are all program I've delivered products to customers with, and none would I trust to deal with MP3 files.

Have you thought for a moment that maybe iMovie is designed as not a professional platform, but in fact a consumer one. Which means, it has to be good an dealing with consumer codecs - H.264 and MP3 included. That is possibly it's ONLY strength. Does it have all the tools available professionals need? No way!

If I were a software developer of a professional tool like Davinci with a focus on editing & grading digital cinema files (IE RAW), would I be investing resources into processing MP3? A crappy ancient, consumer, compression code that was NEVER designed as an intermediate codec?

Simple solution dude - transcode to something DESIGNED to be edited. I can batch transcode one hundred 4min files in under five minutes. How much time have you invested in winging about your MP3 problem? Not to mention the time others have invested to help you? Enough time to transcode a thousand files? Ten thousand? A million?

Here's an idea. How about the OP post a link to an offending MP3 file so that someone can test it in Resolve. What's that you say? That idea has already been proposed? Several times?

But seriously - MP3 files work fine for me (I have an old library of sound effects that I use sometimes). Haven't gotten around to updating them to proper high quality files so they function as placeholders until such time as we pick the specific ones we need to purchase. Same could be true for music tracks with watermarks.

Sounds a bit like H.264 vs RAW video. No doubt uncompressed is lossless, and superior quality but any NLE needs to support all the popular capture and delivery formats.Many say your best quality is whatever you captured and some data is lost with every conversion. If you started with MP3 can you really improve it by converting to uncompressed WAV? MP3 is just the audio portion of MPEG. Like H.264, MP3 quality is affected by bitrate and I doubt many of us would notice the difference between a 192 kbps MP3 vs 44.1 kbps WAV.Like H.264, MP3 compression is not great for editing so the edit software can convert it to uncompressed WAV internally.What's the big deal? "I Just Don't Get It"

One other thing - I was just playing around with a workflow for MP3s (on the assumption that you could at least get your MP3 into Resolve) and found that the Media Management tool cannot transcode audio-only clips (at least I couldn't figure out how to get it to work) so instead I used the delivery page. This is what I did:

1. Created a new project2. Bring all my MP3s into the project (on the media page)3. Select all MP3s, right-click and create a new timeline using selected media4. Go to delivery page - select Audio Only preset5. Select the 'individual clips' option and used source name option and gave it a destination folder6. Added the job to the render queue, started the render job and grabbed a coffee

Within minutes I had a fully transcoded set of MP3s to WAV files without using any 3rd party transcoding software. I was even able to reconform any existing edits to swap the MP3s on the timeline with the transcoded variants.

Of course, this may not work for the OP because perhaps there is something different about the MP3s that is generally causing Resolve a problem (we don't know, yet because we have not received a sample of the offending MP3s). Arguably, the only reason to do this would be to improve performance on the timeline assuming Resolve had a problem decoding MP3s...

Mike Mas wrote:why I can put the same 4k@60 files and a MP3 in a IMovie and it plays and edits fine, I don't even have to optimize the video, yet if I place the same files in Resolve timeline it chokes. Don't give me all the capability lecture about what one program has over the other, this is just a simple example of just playing two files in the timeline.

Read my Lips - there is not one logical reason Resolve should "choke" on a tiny 26MG MP3 file, its Broke!

Regards Mike

Mike, why don't you stay in Imovie totally then? If you want to use another software, then you have to follow ITS particular rules, else you're free to develop your own one and set your own rules.

"Mike, why don't you stay in Imovie totally then?..else you're free to develop your own"Interesting marketing strategy for a new NLE product. I would assume BM welcomes feedback from users of other products

Marc Wielage wrote:But I think a larger part of the role of the colorist today is to help clients avoid doing something ignorant and stupid. It's our job to tactfully tell them, "this will be a bad-sounding source -- let's use this temporarily and try to get a full-res WAV before we finish this." I have no problem doing this with a placeholder. It's no different when they have 10 pieces of MP4 stock footage with a watermark in it, and we'll say, "I'll be sure to drop in the ProRes tomorrow."

There are a lot of jobs where "good enough" will work, but I think a truly good colorist is going to stop a client from damaging their project out of technical ignorance. I'll always push for a better copy of something (sound or picture) whenever there's time or money to do so.

Agreed 100%. But my opinion is still, that when I'm using a placeholder like that, it should work without a hitch, and without requiring conversion. We can agree to disagree about that.

Steve Alexander wrote:Within minutes I had a fully transcoded set of MP3s to WAV files without using any 3rd party transcoding software. I was even able to reconform any existing edits to swap the MP3s on the timeline with the transcoded variants.

That can work, too. And you can embed timecode into Broadcast WAV files and re-encode them to 16-bit 48kHz files as well. It won't make them sound any better, but it will solve the editing & playback problems.

I personally do almost all of my transcoding with batch scripts and ffmpeg. The batch scripts allow me to run ffmpeg in parallel thus squeezing every last ounce of performance out of my machine. All I have to do is drop my source files into a folder and run the batch script.

I too use an FFMPEG based GUI which allows me to quickly batch transcode 4k log files from a DJI camera to DNxHD proxies with reel numbers, timecode, a resize, PCM audio as well as a custom 3D LUT for the Edit - all in the one pass. Couldn't be easier - PC or Mac, there's an app from Wayne Norton, the developer at http://www.HDCinematics.com

Mike, have tried using Media Converter for OSX? It's free, and it rapidly converts between formats. You set up a preset the way you like, then you just drag a whole pile of MP3s onto it, and it will spit out 48kHz AIFFs or whatever you prefer.